Hence why I want to change. I want to get rid of the iframe, the theme developer cannot help as that is me, I customised this theme beyond recognition. But for the life of me I cannot get the ads to show by default the way vBulletin intends.

I would start by installing the theme you modified as it came from the developer, and see if the ads show in the style the way the original developer coded the style. If the do, then you know it is a issue with your changes, if they don't show, then it is a issue with the original style.

Cam someone tell me what is the proper code to actually get these showing on the navbar to make sure I'm doing it correctly and not imagining things, tried to fix this a few times but its not happening for me.